“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an UNLIMITED relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER

Odds of a Hillary email grand jury underway just went much higher

I have speculated that, given the immunity offered to Bryan Pagliano, it is possible
that a grand jury has been convened. But I am not a lawyer, much less a
former US Attorney. Joseph E. diGenova, on the other hand, is one of a
small group of attorneys generally considered a super lawyer, and not
only a veteran US Attorney, but the former US Attorney for Washington,
DC, at the very top of federal prosecutors. So when Joe diGenova offers
an opinion on the likelihood of a grand jury being empanelled, we (a
group that includes Hillary Clinton! – possibly the first time I have
even included myself in a grouping with Hillary) should pay attention. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation spoke with him:

“My
long experience as the United States Attorney and an independent
counsel makes me conclude as a matter of professional judgment that a
grand jury exists,” diGenova told TheDCNF. “It is readily apparent to
me that there is at least a grand jury impaneled for the purposes of
issuing subpoenas,” he said.

The
specifics of diGenova’s expert opinion are daunting for Hillary. It is
not just that violations of law over classified information that are
likely at issue.

“The
Bureau has between 100 and 150 agents assigned to the case. They would
not have that many people assigned to a classified information case….”

Remember that diGenova has actually run investigations. So he knows about resource allocation, and subject matter for inquiry.“Based
on reports that agents are asking questions about the foundation, it
seems to me to properly the subject is a second prong of the
investigation,” he said.And what might that second prong be? He doesn’t say, but Pollock offers this helpful reminder:

The Department of State’s Inspector General (IG) subpoenaed documents from the Clinton Foundation last
fall to determine if State Department policies had been influenced by
foundation activities. The State IG asked for records held by the
foundation and Huma Abedin, who for six months simultaneously worked for
former Secretary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.A number of the 55,000 pages of government-related emails that were released under a court order also show numerous emails between Clinton’s aides and the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, Amitabh Desai.

And another anonymous source says:

The
corruption probe is being led by the Justice Department’s public
integrity division, a former FBI agent who requested anonymity told
TheDCNF.

That
would be consistent with bribery charges and the like. Far beyond
abuses of classified information, and if successfully prosecuted,
opening the possibility of prison. Reports that the FBI forensic team
has recovered the erased emails from Hillary’s server open the door to
many other charges including destruction of evidence and criminal
conspiracy.

Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.

March 7, 2016

The last refuge of the scoundrel Hillary

Samuel
Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel
doesn’t apply to Hillary Clinton in her email scandal, because nobody –
not even her die-hard supporters – would believe her if she said that
she set up the private email server in the interests of the United
States. Rather, the last refuge of this scoundrel is to blame everybody
else she dealt with at the State Department, in the process impugning
not only her own close aides, but career diplomats and other
nonpolitical professionals who deserve better.

This
strategy is reflected in the campaign’s current mantra that
“everybody,” including former secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza
Rice, at one time or another sent emails that were later determined to
be classified. A recent Washington Post analysis of Hillary’s released
classified emails demonstrates that she directly sent at least 104
to various aides and officials, and that they too, including the
current secretary of state, John Kerry, occasionally sent out emails
through nonsecure servers that were later deemed classified. However,
what the analysis also shows is that these government officials, when
they did use unsecured servers, at least used government accounts, which
provide a measure of security, not a private home-brewed server like
Mrs. Clinton’s.The
Post’s news editors must be popping a lot of Thorazine, because their
coverage of Clinton is increasingly schizophrenic. As longtime readers
of the paper know, the news operation is considerably more left-leaning
than the editorial side (which occasionally takes a more centrist
view). News stories are routinely slanted to present the most favorable
liberal perspective and mock or demean opposing outlooks. This
tendency is apparent in the Clinton case as well. The Post has broken
some important stories in the email scandal, like the recent revelation that the Justice Department granted former Clinton I.T. aide Bryan Pagliano immunity. And the Post’s most heroic figures, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
have separately suggested that the Clinton scandal is the real thing.
But since Hillary is the Post’s gal, they seeded the Pagliano report
with expert liberal analysis that suggested that the immunity deal is
either nothing to get excited about (a weird way to promote a scoop) or
actually a good thing for Clinton, while omitting contrary interpretations.

The
Post’s analysis of her emails follows the same pattern. On the one
hand, the news that Clinton herself personally authored over 100
classified items cuts against her chosen narrative that she got a lot of
emails and that she can hardly have been expected to actually read and
analyze them all for security issues as she received them or passed them
on. On the other hand, the article goes out of its way to suggest that
this was an endemic problem at State. And strangely again, the
explanation is rather contradictory. We are told that the sending and
receipt of classified information was the result of poor security
procedures that preceded Clinton’s arrival. But we are also told (in
line with claims made by Clinton and her campaign) that there is a
culture of “over-classification” in the government. So which is it?
Were officials at State too lax about security procedures or too anal?
If nothing else, one thing this controversy demonstrates is that the
Clinton State Department was pretty much a mess.

But
besides the country itself, which is now enduring yet more Clintonian
malfeasance in the midst of a critical election, are many individuals
that Clinton is cold-bloodily demeaning in an attempt to exonerate
herself with the “everybody did it” canard. This rests on the weak
premise that other government officials – aides, ambassadors, career
officials – occasionally misidentified information as innocuous or
insufficiently sensitive to merit security classification. There is
little doubt this happened, and continues to happen, as government
employees do their best to protect sensitive information but not bog the
government down in layers of unnecessary security protocol. But none
of the officials identified in the Post analysis did this deliberately
by establishing a private home-brewed email system to avoid State
Department classification procedures entirely – and this no less, by the
head of the State Department itself.

The
Post article anonymously quotes one poor soul (identified as a former
senior official) whose good name has now been impugned as a careless
operator: “I resent the fact that we are in this situation – and we’re
in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private
email server.”

Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.

ALL
HILLARY CLINTON DID AS SECRETARY of STATE, ARGUABLY ALL SHE DOES
PERIOD, IS SUCK UP TO MUSLIM DICTATORS, OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS AND
CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRE CRONYIES OF BILLARY.... SO SHE AND BILLARY CAN SUCK
IN THOSE BIG BRIBES TO THEIR PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION! OTHER
THAN THE TENS OF MILLIONS IN BRIBES SHE SUCKED UP AS SEC. OF STATE, HER
TENURE WAS AN UTTER DISASTERS AS WOULD BE ANOTHER WALL STREET BACKED
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION!

The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes

By Tom Hall

7 March 2016

Last Monday, the US State Department published the last batch
of declassified emails from a private, unsecured server used by
Democratic

presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
during her tenure as secretary of state. This latest release draws to a
close a year-long review by US intelligence agencies of 52,000 pages of
Clinton emails, ostensibly motivated by concerns over possible leaks of
classified material.

To date, more than 30,000 emails
dating from Clinton’s four-year tenure as secretary of state have been
released to the public. Clinton played a central role in the prosecution
of aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as well as the
carrying out of drone assassinations and other
illegal actions in a
number of additional countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Yet in its extensive reporting of the email scandal, the American media
has virtually ignored the actual content of these emails, which contain a
wealth of information about the day-to-day functioning of the Clinton
State Department.

A review of even a small sampling of
the emails, which are available on the State Department’s web site,
reveals the reason why: the emails are a damning indictment of the
criminal activities of not only Hillary Clinton herself, but the entire
imperialist state apparatus, with the corporate-controlled media in tow.
The emails could easily serve as evidence in future war crimes trials
of Clinton and other top US officials.

One particularly revealing email from 2010, cited by the Interceptn web
site but not picked up by the national media, recounts the experiences
of former ambassador Joseph Wilson (whose CIA agent wife
Valerie
Plame was outed by the Bush administration in retaliation for his
criticisms of the war in Iraq) during a recent trip to Iraq in his
capacity as an executive for a US engineering firm. The Obama
administration,
elected by exploiting mass anti-war sentiment, continued the US
occupation of Iraq for three years during Obama’s first term in office,
when Clinton was secretary of state, prolonging a conflict that claimed
more than 1 million lives. Since then, US troops have returned to Iraq,
ostensibly to fight ISIS, as part of the US war for regime-change in
neighboring Syria.

Wilson’s email begins: “My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have
struggled
to find the correct historical analogy to describe a
vibrant,historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to
death.Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated, but they and
their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation.”

Describing
the rampant racism and sadism among US occupation troops, Wilson
writes, “Shirts with mushroom clouds [for sale at a gift shop on a US
military base at the Baghdad airport] conveyed the Baghdad weather as
32,000 degrees and partly cloudy. Others referred to Arabs as camel
jockeys
and those were the least offensive… The service people don’t see
themselves there to bring peace, light, joy or even democracy to Iraq.
They are there to kill the ‘camel jockeys.’”

Hundreds more emails deal with the US-led proxy war in Libya, in which Clinton played a
leading role. As a recent series of articles in the New York Times confirmed,
Clinton was the leading advocate in the White House for the clandestine
arming of “rebel” militias comprised largely of Islamic fundamentalists,
which comprised the main fighting force against the regime of Muammar
Gaddafi.

One email from February 2011, written by a
veteran diplomat before the launching of the US-NATO war that ended with
the murder of Gaddafi, lays out proposals for the construction of a
future “post-Gaddafi” political order in Libya. The memo recommends the
use of the United Nations to lend political legitimacy to the
imperialist carve-up of the country.

“A UN ‘hat’
for multinational/international assistance efforts could be effective,”
the author states bluntly. However, the extensive involvement of Italy,
whose participation in the war marked a return to the scene of its bloody
colonial occupation, should, the author recommends, be “kept relatively
low-profile.” Another email chain discusses how to disburse the tens of
billions of dollars of frozen Libyan assets stolen by the imperialist
powers during the regime-change operation.

Many other
emails concern the organization and coordination of the Obama
administration's drone assassination program, which has killed thousands
in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. “Twenty-two of the emails on Mrs.
Clinton’s server have now been classified as ‘top secret’ at the demand
of
the CIA because they discuss the program to hunt and kill terrorist
suspects using drone strikes, as well as other intelligence operations
and sources,” the New York Times noted two weeks ago, prior to
the
latest release. “The emails [also] contain direct and indirect
references to secret programs,” the newspaper added obliquely.

One
such secret program was the bribing of high-ranking officials in the
Afghan government by the CIA. “[The US embassy in Afghanistan's] line
has been and will be the standard approach--that we refrain from comment
on stories discussing intelligence matters,” one embassy official
writes in a 2010 email, in response to an impending New York Times story
revealing that Muhammad Zia Salehi, head of the Afghan National
Security Council, was on the CIA payroll. Later reports by the Times revealed that former President Hamid Karzai for years received shopping bags full of cash from the CIA on a regular basis.

Dozens
of emails document the collusion between the corporate-controlled media
and the State Department in containing the fallout from the release of
US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks. In one
2010 exchange, Washington Post
writer Craig Whitlock reaches out to the State Department to request “a
mechanism to receive [the] State [Department's] input” before running a
series of articles based on cables revealing the existence of a secret
US drone base in the Seychelles Islands, off the coast of Somalia.

The exchange demonstrates that the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times,
provided the State Department with advance printed copies of every
cable about which they planned to write, along with drafts to the White
House, to be redacted or censored at their discretion. In a conversation
between Whitlock’s State Department handlers, they note approvingly
that
the practice “was extremely helpful in preparing our redaction
requests, as well as anticipating what damage control we’d need to do in
diplomatic channels.” Another email describes an editorial by the Washington Post calling for the prosecution of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange and
Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning as “helpful,” adding, “We’ll try and get pickup in [the] international media.”

Clinton also received hundreds of emails via her private server from Sidney Blumenthal, a
former
advisor in the Bill Clinton administration, who served as the head of
Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Blumenthal, then an employee of the
Clinton Family Foundation, functioned as a de facto back channel
intelligence gatherer and advisor for Clinton, despite not
officially
being a member of her staff. It was Blumenthal’s 2015 testimony to the
House Select Committee on Benghazi, the Republican-controlled body set
up for the purpose of torpedoing the
likely presidential run of Clinton, which revealed the existence of Clinton’s private email server.

Blumenthal sent Clinton a wide array of intelligence reports from foreign countries targeted by US
imperialism.
In one email, he passes on concerns that Islamist militias in Libya
might retaliate against the assassination of Osama bin Laden,using
weapons obtained from the United States. In another, he recounts the
furtive dealings between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian
military to smother the Egyptian revolution, writing that the two will
“continue to work together secretly in an effort to establish a stable
government” and create “a secure environment throughout the country” for
investment.

In
another email, Blumenthal advises Clinton on how to orchestrate the
cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of bin Laden
in a cross-border raid into Pakistan by US Special Forces. As a report
by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later made clear, the official
version of bin Laden’s death was a collection of lies from start to
finish.

“Show [the pictures of bin Laden’s body] to members of Congress in a special secure room,
something
like when members were permitted to view Abu Ghraib pictures,”
Blumenthal writes. “Each of them will emerge speaking to the national and
local press on what they have seen… Having members of Congress testify
to the reality of the photos will suppress any potential ‘Deather’
movement, that the administration has either fabricated the event or
suppressed some aspect of it.”

What the ultimate out come of the Clinton email scandal will be is not yet clear. An FBI criminal
investigation
into the emails is ongoing, with signs that the case might be headed to
a grand jury. On Wednesday, a former employee of Clinton’s 2008
presidential campaign, Bryan Pagliano, who set up the private email
server in Clinton’s home, was granted immunity by federal investigators
as part of the investigation.